Some of My Web Site History

Well, this is a quickie as I am busy with both my websites and my fibre. You may notice when going through my ‘stable’, that the site for Arrowsmith Leather is badly broken…images not there or only appearing when clicked on. I’m now very close to replacing it with the new website in WordPress.

My first and last platform used was Freeway Pro made only for Macs and out of the UK. They were amazing. This was long before tablets and smart phones so ‘responsive’ wasn’t even born! So I plodded on with this wonderful WYSYWYG drag and drop starting with their Freeway Express…then graduating to Pro. Then there was a plugin (well sort of) from Forge, for making a slide show….I used that and it worked well. There was a lot of building with Freeway but though they had some templates I built from scratch using a blank page.

However, after 20 years they decided to close down and let us all know that there would be no more updates but the forum would still be there. It was good and I had used it a lot, as I had with the folks at Freeway. I’d email them with a problem and they’d get right back to me, even to the point of having me send my whole troubled site for them to analyze and tell me how to fix it.

I have been working with WordPress over the past four years or so with associations who’s blogs or sites I had to take over and maintain…a pain when you didn’t build it in the first place and had no clue about WordPress in the second place. Oh well…

Now I feel like a kid in a candy store there is so much to chose from…I just started experimenting with Elementor Page Builder and am looking forward to using it along with SiteOrigins which I like. In editing other sites which aren’t my own I’ve learned a few more plugins that I find easy and useful. I’d like to head back to starting from scratch instead of using templates.

Well, I’m partway through my epic rebuild…I need to rebuild all my old sites and bring them up to snuff….it’ll be great to have them now responsive which was difficult to do with Freeway…they tried but it was tricky to formulate.

Update: 2018. Rebuild all done and Arrowsmith Leather now has an up to date WordPress website.